Word: ovitz
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This is the guy. How powerful is Mike Ovitz? He's so powerful that when the heads of two film studios and one of his own senior employees were asked last week what they thought of him, all three men sang his praises but insisted on anonymity, for fear that Mike might be upset that they had said anything at all -- and then had second second thoughts, calling Ovitz to confess pre- emptively that they had talked to a reporter...
...Mike Ovitz so powerful? Very simple: most of the really big movie stars are represented by him and his agency, including Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Hanks, Michael Keaton, Bill Murray, Al Pacino, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams. They also represent most of the top directors, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and John Hughes. And most of the top screenwriters. The only weak spot, according to one of those reticent studio chiefs, is in music; there, CAA's client roster is peopled by such nobodies as Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson and Madonna...
Being the ultimate agent, however, isn't enough for Ovitz; he's thinking bigger, ignoring nearly all the comfortable old show business boundaries. Lately he has extended his radius of operations, scaring the bejesus out of Madison Avenue by devising two dozen smart, sexy TV spots for Coca-Cola, and he may be looking to poach other business from the ad agencies. And still he wants more. He has turned himself into the movie industry's highest-profile investment broker in the past few years, arranging the multibillion-dollar acquisitions of Columbia Pictures by Sony and MCA/Universal by Matsushita...
...move that has whipped up an uncharacteristically public feud in Hollywood, Ovitz has gone one, possibly crucial step further: he has been retained by Credit Lyonnais, the French bank that took over MGM/United Artists in a foreclosure last year, to straighten out its bad-news, $3.4 billion movie-loan portfolio (last month the bank wrote off a third of those loans), to find new investments and, Ovitz hopes, to sell the studio. In the view of Jeff Berg, who runs rival International Creative Management, Ovitz's arrangement makes him crypto-chairman of MGM, which represents an untenable -- and perhaps illegal...
Will CAA clients get special treatment from MGM, as Berg suggests? Or will the opposite happen, with MGM getting sweetheart deals for the actors and directors and writers whom Ovitz's agency represents? And when the bank finally gets around to selling MGM, will Ovitz's insider knowledge give him an unfair edge in making or avoiding deals for his clients with the studio...